Live-translation AirPods are the future

I have arrived in Naples, Italy, after an arduous flight from a chaotic London Gatwick Airport. I’m settled in a glamorous top floor apartment in the Quartieri Spagnoli – the romantic old “Spanish Quarter” – where Vespas fizz over cobbles and laundry hangs across alleys like flags of endless surrender.

Most importantly, I’m clutching my Apple AirPods3 in their shiny new capsule. Because I’ve come here to do a grand, futuristic experiment using their much-heralded “live translate” function.

Does it really work as smoothly as Apple says? Can I actually slot them in my ears and have them translate the Italian speaker in front of me, in real time? Is it really like the sci-fi Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? And will this end the linguistic division of humankind – and all the trouble that springs therefrom?

I’m raring to go. I’m about to do – in my own modest way – one of the more important experiments in human history, and then I discover that the new Apple AirPods3 do not support Italian. Just French, Spanish, Portuguese and German, so far. Also, the use of these new AirPods is gravely restricted in the European Union due to Apple’s dislike of the EU’s various AI laws. So I can’t download the software.

It seems I am about to infuriate my Spectator editor – “didn’t you check???” – but then I remind myself that I am vaguely prone to criminality, and not without deviousness. Using a virtual private network I routed back to the UK, I manage to source the software, probably illegally, but hey. After a bit more fiddling (you have to download all the available languages, including English) I have the AirPods up and running.

Now I’m ready. All I need is some foreigners speaking foreign. Even if Italians will be incomprehensible, Naples is a big tourist city and it will be packed with travelers from across Europe – including France, Spain, Germany and Portugal. My guinea pigs.

My first stop is the celebrated and historic Gran Caffè Gambrinus, at the edge of the Spanish Quarter. It doesn’t take me long to find some German students and they seem happy to indulge my experiment. But it’s here I encounter the first drawback of the brilliant new Apple AirPods3 – as the Germans are not wearing Apple AirPods3, they won’t hear my English words translated, magically into German. This will be a one-sided linguistic miracle.

Nonetheless we give it a go. And as they speak to me in German, and Apple’s chirpy British Siri voice translates it in real time, pumping it into my brain, I experience a prickle of eerie surprise. I am staring into the uncanny valley of language.

I know that the AirPods are working, because the new Apple Translate app handily transcribes all the words on to your phone screen as you listen and speak. When I show these words to the Germans they say, “Ja, translation ist good.” However it doesn’t feel quite right in my head because the translation lags – the tech has to wait until it’s got a sense of the whole sentence before it can whisper the interpretation in your ear.

Also, the AirPods do not automatically detect the tongue spoken. If you forget to toggle to the right language you will hear something like “glu llech ggbboo noot” – that’s a direct transcription from my app. In other words, the tech can be glitchy, slow and beta. But then Apple openly admits this. They’ve slapped a beta label on it.

Over the next few hours I stage conversations with French, Brazilian and Swiss people, each of which I have to set up and explain beforehand. Again, the tech is impressive but it feels forced. What I need is to be immersed in a foreign language group, so I can listen and interact normally.

Then I have a brainwave. If I book myself on a Spanish language tour of subterranean Naples, I will be surrounded by Spanish speakers who won’t care about the strange Brit with AirPods lurking at the back. I meet the guide group in lively Piazza Dante and it’s here that I have my epiphany. Now the AirPods are truly whirring: and the tech – at times – is so cleverly good it nearly makes me tearful.

You know those moving videos of little kids who grow up deaf and are suddenly given the ability to hear by some genius doctor, and you watch as their faces explode with joy? I am getting a sliver of that, here in Naples, as I realize I can understand – for the first time in my whole life – what all the foreign people around me are saying.

Like most Britons, I’m a tragic monoglot, with about ten words of French and fewer still in German and Spanish. All my life I’ve regretted this, yet not done much about it. I’m terrible at languages.

With my AirPods3, this profound human barrier is beginning to crumble. As I tilt my phone this way and that I can eavesdrop on these foreign conversations, on this man telling his girlfriend, “I love you,” that wife tetchily saying, “We should have gone to Sorrento first.” As for the guide, she babbles away in Spanish and I stand here beaming – I understand every word. When the tour continues, I realize that there are still plenty of flaws in the technology. At some points the tech lapses into total gibberish, at others it is hilariously wrong – I am unconvinced the innocent guide really means that the Devil came to Naples “for the pussy.”

Nonetheless: wow. That is the only word for this software when it works as it should (and remember, like all artificial intelligence, it will only get better). This really is Babel Fish; it is really here.

What does this mean for the future? For travel? For international politics? There are so many potentially profound ramifications it is hard to say. Then there is the emotional impact: the shock of the new. For many people, I suspect, using these AirPods – and their superior and cheaper successors – will be the first time they truly understand how AI is going to change everything. The future is as foreign, thrilling and unnerving as the darkest streets of old Naples.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.